On Tuesday, we traveled to Bethlehem to visit the Church of the Nativity and see the birthplace of Jesus. Bethlehem is not far from Ramallah, but it took an hour to get there, weaving through the back roads and villages in order to avoid the main checkpoints along the way. We did get stuck at a tiyar for about 20 minutes. Tiyar is the Arabic word for a temporary checkpoint. The permanent ones are called masoob. If you’re lucky, you only have to go through a masoob to get to where you are going. But usually, you’ll hit a tiyar or two along the way.

As we waited at the tiyar, I asked our driver, Ahmed, if it was like this most days.

“Yes, most days,” he said. Ahmed was missing fingers from his stay in an Israeli prison some years ago.

When we finally got to Bethlehem, we met up with a tour guide that one of Linda’s friends had arranged for us.

He spoke English and gave us a great tour of the church.

There were very few other tourist, and our guide told us that tourism had plummeted since the Israeli military invaded Bethlehem and the entire city was locked down with Palestinian militants trapped inside the church. Some of the windows in the main sanctuary were still broken from gunfire.

The place were Jesus was born is literally underneath the church. You go down some stairs into a crepuscular, cave-like room. The birthplace is surrounded by candles and icons. A star in the floor marks the supposed exact spot where Jesus spilled out of Mary’s womb. I didn’t get a very good view of it because there was another group that came down with us that had some very devout Christians in it who were compelled to kneel down and kiss the star again and again. While said ground kissing may have been spiritually cleansing, it was far from sanitary. Just to the right of the birthplace and down some more steps is the manager.

Unfortunately, because we left in the early afternoon and it had taken so long to get to Bethlehem from Ramallah, we only had time to see the Church of Nativity. We left to head back across the main checkpoint through the wall the Israelis are building. Here there were x-ray machines and metal detectors, similar to an airport. [For more information about the wall, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_West_Bank_barrier ]

“Are we getting on an airplane?” Emma asked.

“No this is just a checkpoint.”

“Oh, it’s like an airport.”

Through the checkpoint you enter the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. From there we got on a micro-bus back to Ramallah, through narrow and winding pot-holed streets the went right along the wall until you reach Qalandiya and cross back into Ramallah.